Jack Stilgoe
Senior Researcher
Jack Stilgoe works on science and technology projects and specialises in issues of science, society and public engagement.
"science"
Jack Stilgoe has 39 items tagged with this theme. Find more on this theme : » show items from across the site
- The synthesizer Demos has this morning hosted a round table with Craig Venter, controversial human genome projecteer and now spearhead of the next Next Big Thing: Synthetic Biology (or Synthetic Genomics if you prefer). Venter was engagingly open about the possibilities and pitfalls of Syn Bio, which promises to combine engineering with biology to design new lifeforms. He pointed to the possibilities of energy and fuel generation from new organisms and warned us that, if an innovative Siberian happened upon... from : jackstilgoe 23rd October 2007
- Is public science a public good? Should we be worried about companies funding university science? Does it make for more innovation or is it poisoning science and blackening our ivory towers? Join us for a debate on the future of public science.We are delighted to have the following speakers Philip Moriarty, Professor of physics, University of Nottingham Ben Goldacre, Scientist and journalist Terence Kealey, Vice Chancellor University of Buckingham John Pethica, Chief Scientist, National Physical Laboratory Ian... from : jackstilgoe 3rd March 2008
- Trust me, I'm the head of immunisation at the Department of Health Vaccines are an interesting condensation point for debates about science, the public good, personal freedom and choice. As the UK government found a few years back with the MMR vaccine, you get in trouble if you are on the one hand telling people to choose everything to do with their healthcare and on the other coercing them into vaccination for the public good. The evidence, as we found out, won't win arguments that messy. There's a nice book co-authored by Demos friend Melissa Leach that... from : jackstilgoe 10th March 2008
- Ask me no questions, I'll give you the facts Just caught Ben Goldacre's programme on Radio 4. Ben, for those who don't know, is the man behind the Guardian's Bad Science column. He is keen on using science to debunk snake oil merchants and puncturing the scientific claims that they make. When he first began writing, I thought he was a naive positivist. But, the more I read and occasionally chat to him, the more I sympathise with and learn from his approach to the new politics of science, expertise and evidence. He is tackling some... from : jackstilgoe 31st March 2008
- Is politics stuck in the present? As the Human Fertilisation and Embryology bill ducks and weaves through parliament, the debate around it reveals the poverty of the politics of the future. Politicians are pretty happy talking about VALUES, INTERESTS, THE EVIDENCE and even ETHICS. So abortion gets the headlines, alongside daddies for test tube babies. When it comes to the research aspects - hybrids, embryonic vs adult stem cells and all that - the evidence and the ethics are only part of the story. So Ann Widdecombe insists... from : jackstilgoe 21st May 2008
- Public science and public goods Our debate on university science a couple of weeks back has been picked up by Times Higher. It served the important, and possibly therapeutic, purpose of getting some things out into the open. As someone with strong opinions in this area, I found my independence as a chair stretched. But my desire was to expose some unacknowledged tensions and start a genuinely new conversation about where science in universities is going and what assumptions are steering it. The debate was instigated by... from : jackstilgoe 2nd June 2008
- Making it up as we go along Synthetic Biology has again found its way onto the Today programme. The prompt this time is an admirable report (pdf) from bioscience funders the BBSRC, who asked social scientists Paul Martin and Andrew Balmer to map the social and ethical questions raised by this increasingly frenetic science. But the BBC's report is inevitably framed by Craig Venter, the energetic and unapologetic face of all things synthetic. Six months ago, when we hosted Craig Venter, I was convinced that the UK had a... from : jackstilgoe 10th June 2008
- Scifoo 1 - The Wisdom of clouds I'm weekending at the Scifoo camp inside the Googleplex, Silicon Valley. Geeks, Nobel laureates, Astronauts and hangers-on have gathered at science's bleeding edge to share their thoughts with no agenda, no hierarchy and ridiculous amounts of food. As though it had been decreed, today's first session clawed towards Science 2.0. Tim O'Reilly, the man to blame for everything 2.0, began with some explanations. Web 2.0, apparently, is about participation. Google is king, even though its model... from : jackstilgoe 9th August 2008
- Things can only get better. That, or the world collapses The Large Hadron Collider at CERN has been switched on. And we're apparently still here. Over at the Sci Foo camp, I bumped into Brian Cox, Physicist and former keyboard player for D:Ream. He works at CERN and told me about a science NGO I hadn't come across before. "Sane Science" are one of the organisations who have been, Cassandra-like, ringing alarm bells about the LHC. They point us back to the beard-stroking whimsy of the few scientists who once said that there just might be a... from : jackstilgoe 28th August 2008